The door closed for the second time.
This time, the quiet it left was different. Fuller. The kind of quiet that came after something had been lost that could not be unlost, that sat in a room and occupied the space the person had been standing in and did not diminish.
Seb stood in it for approximately thirty seconds. Then he picked up his phone.
He was not a man who sat quietly. Never had been. Quiet required stillness, and stillness required the kind of self-examination he had spent most of his adult life building a very busy, very loud, very expensive life specifically to avoid.
He found Amira's name.
Called it.
She answered on the fourth ring.
He could hear it immediately, the particular acoustics of her apartment, the sound of someone who had recently arrived home and not yet fully settled, the small background sounds of a life resuming after interruption. Amira had been out of custody for not long. A few hours at most.
